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No Takers for Faster DSL

It’s been obvious for over a decade that the big telcos have given up on DSL. AT&T was the last big telco to bite on upgraded DSL. They sold millions of lines of U-verse connections that combined two pairs of copper and using VSDL or ADSL2 to deliver up to 50 Mbps download speeds. Those speeds were only available to customers who lived with 3,000 – 4,000 feet from a DSL hub, but for a company that owns all of the copper, that was a lot of potential customers.

Other big telcos didn’t bite on the paired-copper DSL and communities served by Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier and others are still served by older DSL technologies that delivers speeds of 15 Mbps or less.

The companies that manufacture DSL continued to do research and have developed faster DSL technologies. The first breakthrough was G.fast that is capable of delivering speeds near to a gigabit, but for only short distances up to a few hundred feet. The manufacturers hoped the technology would be used to build a fiber-to-the curb network, but that economic model never made much sense. However, G.fast is finally seeing use as a way to distribute high bandwidth inside apartment buildings or larger businesses using the existing telephone copper without having to rewire a building.

Several companies like AdTran and Huawei have continued to improve DSL, and through a technique known as supervectoring have been able to goose speeds as high as 300 Mbps from DSL. The technology achieves improved bandwidth in two ways. First it uses higher frequencies inside the telephone copper. DSL works somewhat like an HFC cable network in that it uses RF technology to create the data transmission waves inside of the captive wiring network. Early generations of DSL used frequencies up to 8 MHz and the newer technologies climb as high as 35 MHz. The supervectoring aspect of the technology comes through techniques that can cancel interference at the higher frequencies.

In the US this new technology is largely without takers. AdTran posted a blog that says that there doesn’t seem to be a US market for faster DSL. That’s going to be news to the millions of homes that are still using slower DSL. The telcos could upgrade speeds to as much as 300 Mbps for a cost of probably no more than a few hundred dollars per customer. This would provide for another decade of robust competition from telephone copper. While 300 Mbps is not as fast as the gigabit speeds now offered by cable companies using DOCSIS 3.1 it’s as fast as the cable broadband still sold to most homes.

This new generation of DSL technology could enable faster broadband to millions of homes. I’ve visiting dozens of small towns in the country, many without a cable competitor where the DSL speeds are still at 6 Mbps speeds or less. The big telcos have milked customers for years to pay for the old DSL and are not willing to invest some of those earnings back into another technology upgrade. To me this is largely due to deregulating the broadband industry because there are no regulators pushing the big telcos to do the right thing. Upgrading would be the right thing because the telcos could retain millions of DSL customers for another decade, so it would be a smart economic decision.

There is not a lot of telephone copper around the globe it was only widely deployed in North America and Europe. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom (DT) is deploying the supervectoring DSL to about 160,000 homes this quarter. The technical press there is lambasting them for not making the leap straight to fiber. DT counters by saying that they can deliver the bandwidth that households need today. The new deployment is driving them to build fiber deeper into neighborhoods and DT expects to then make the transition to all-fiber within a decade. Households willing to buy bandwidth between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps are not going to care what technology is used to deliver it.

There is one set of companies willing to use the faster DSL in this country. There are still some CLECs who are layering DSL onto telco copper, and I’ve written about several of these CLECs over the last few months. I don’t know any who are specifically ready to use the technology, but I’m sure they’ve all considered it. They are all leery about making any new investments in DSL upgrades since the FCC is considering eliminating the requirement that telcos provide access to the copper wires. This would be a bad regulatory decision since there are companies willing to deliver a faster alternative to cable TV by using the telco copper lines. It’s obvious that none of the big telcos are going to consider the faster DSL and we shouldn’t shut the door on companies willing to make the investments.